Librebox: An open source, Roblox-compatible game engine

https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo

75•libreboxdevs•4h ago

Comments

extraduder_ire•2h ago

Cool. There's an incredible amount of content created for roblox that's stuck on it currently.

wernerb•2h ago

Need to set free all that 'Club' content for sure.

glitchc•2h ago

Yeah but can I spend Robux on it? If not, pass.

The whole problem is Robux isn't it? It's not like the engine is anything special.

andybak•2h ago

Maybe the idea is that developers can release standalone versions of their Roblox games and escape the platform lock-in? Of course - whether their audience will come with them is a different question.

Wowfunhappy•1h ago

I haven't used them (and I despise Roblox) but my understanding is that the Roblox creation tools are actually pretty good.

a2128•1h ago

There's a number of developers who get stuck on ROBLOX because they learned their creation tools when they were younger (they're easy to use and easily accessible to any desktop ROBLOX player), spent their formative years mastering their skills, and those skills turn out to be niche and not easily transferable to most other game engines. The choice is between basically restarting as a beginner in Unity, or continue making advanced creations on ROBLOX with all their friends and prestige they've earned in various sub-communities. To be honest I'm surprised it took this long for someone to try making an API-compatible alternative

poly2it•2h ago

Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.

Wowfunhappy•1h ago

> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team.

I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal.

If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android.

(Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)

999900000999•1h ago

Two factors are at play.

This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something.

Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits.

In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours

gjsman-1000•1h ago

In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will.

The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.

kartoffelsaft•1h ago

Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.

(also not a lawyer)

Wowfunhappy•44m ago

To use an emulator, you have to make copies of copyrighted games. Yes this should be perfectly legal, but there is at least room for people to argue here. Homebrew exists, but most users aren't downloading emulators to play Homebrew, and if the emulator has any game specific patches, or even compatibility lists, you could point to that as evidence. Similarly, let's be real, most people probably aren't dumping their own games.

By contrast, the use case for Librebox seems very clear to me. "I'm a developer. I made this Roblox game. (It's my game, I own the copyright.) I want my game to run outside of Roblox."

If NES emulators were geared (exclusively and clearly) to game developers, that would be different.

conradev•16m ago

  So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical.

Emulators often require handling copyrighted materials like games or firmware, whereas APIs are not copyrightable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...

ktallett•1h ago

This is fantastic! It is a very useful tool for preservation of games on Roblox. I hope this can be used for good to save the many creative and original works on the platform in a way that we didn't with flash games.

Dilettante_•1h ago

>in a way that we didn't with flash games

I thought Flashpoint[1] did pretty well about that? The full download is 1.68TB, I'd wager most stuff you'd have seen back then would be on there.

[1]https://flashpointarchive.org/

unleaded•19m ago

Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)

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